Having To Let Everyone Go

Hi all, welcome back after this summer break! Unfortunately we have some sad news to share with you all. We have been forced to let everyone go, also the founders of the studio. This is of course very, very sad. The game will be up on Steam and the support service will be active, and technically the company will continue to exist. We will even visit EGX in Birmingham in a month. We worked night and day for finding a solution if this would ever happen, but all our leads fell trough in the last minute.

It’s now almost exactly three months since we released Lake Ridden. While the game scored an overwhelmingly positive reception from its players (96% positive during its first month) and had the best possible launch (stay tuned for more details in the next blog post), we have sold fewer copies we ever believed would be possible for a high quality game. We worked with 2 really good PR firms, exhibited the game on 4 conferences where people lined up to play, got major coverage, really good reviews, posted viral blog posts and GIFs, had 400 000 followers on our coder Johan’s twitter, got nominated for awards and had some of the biggest streams out there pick the game up. But this has not translated into sales, unfortunately.

When we set out to found this studio in late 2015 things looked very different on Steam. In 2015 approximately 2 900 new games were released, and Greenlight was still part of the process. In 2017 more games were released on Steam than on all years combined up to that (2004-2016), a.k.a around 7 000 games that year. In 2018 more than 10 000 new games are set to release (almost 200 new titles each week). The average Steam user buys 8 new games per year (those include all titles, such as GTA, Skyrim, indie titles, DLCs etc). Despite the game being loved and played by those who have found it, it has not sold nearly enough to keep a studio of five up and running.

We’re all looking for new jobs right now, and a proper post-mortem of Lake Ridden will soon be published, containing more details. We’re super thankful for everyone that cheered on us, that supported the development and that told their friends about the game. Releasing a game that truly left an impression, that felt unique, is a tremendous achievement. Building a studio from the ground up, hiring awesome employees and securing investments worth of 1,5m SEK are something we will forever be proud of. Stay tuned for more info!